Just Sayin' Howdy

So I been busy.

*boo, hiss, she always says that!!!*

Ok, ok. I been dating someone fabulous. OK? And working. And attempting to build a social life.

Writing isn't really that conducive to having a social life.

The main reason I'm here right now is 'cause I've notices that Biting Beaver has gone invitation only, and I'm wondering if I could get an invite. BB? You out there? I meeeeeees you.

Oh yeah. I'm gay. Ain't going back, at least as far as having meaningful relationships. Life seems a little bit less heavy now that that's out there on the table. Already talked to the mom and everything. The girl I'm with is fabulous, as I already mentioned, and I hope that it sticks. Looks like it's gonna. We're moving in together. But I know that I don't want to invest THAT particular kind of energy in men anymore. I tried 'em, and I gave 'em back. Too bad I can't get a refund.

What else? I've missed everyone. Wonder if folks still come around and look at this page. If so, gimme a holler.

I'm gonna go eat a chicken leg now.

EVEN More Stupid Shit From... Yeah, You Guessed It.

Summer's here. And so now, this kinda shit's everywhere.

Apparently all my personal struggle and strife that led me to realize that no matter what I do I'm fat and I'll look fat in a swimsuit and that's perfectly fine, because being fat doesn't make me less human coulda been bypassed had I just, at some time or other, been able to hork up the two hundred bucks or more it takes to purchase a well-engineered piece of lycra to cover my woman-bits just so.

A call to all socially-conscious fat women: DON'T spend 200 dollars on a bathing suit! Go to Kmart, get a suit, then spend the rest on something better. Please.

And watch this. It's good to balance out the Advertising Industrial Complex PTSD-jitters.

Shoes. And the Slipping Down of my Feminist Life.

Ok, ok, maybe I'm being just a little bit melodramatic. But I just bought these shoes:

And so logically, I honestly have to ask myself whether or not the makeup and perfume has poisoned me. Or what. At least they're comfy and they make me tall, right? RIGHT???

Patti Smith

So I got lost in the Craigslist malay last night; am now trying to decide whether boycotting craigslist will be fruitless, futile, or just alienate me from cheap used furniture.

Anyhoo, seeing all the ads in the "erotic services" section triggered me. To utilize the lingo.

See, I get depressed pretty frequently but usually am engaged in work and so can avoid my own feelings, unhealthy as that may sound. Thing about my feelings is that they make me do stupid, self-destructive stuff sometimes, when the *bad ones* start to manifest I get real wack-o. Can't afford that anymore, literally and figuratively. So stuffing, avoidance, distraction, all that's what I tend to do to work around it.

So stupid me had never ever seen the "erotic services" section on the craigslist. So I notice it last night, think, "what the fuck is that? Is that what I think it is?" And click. Oblivion, almost. Right?

Generally, when I ask myself, "Is that what I think it is?" the answer is usually "YES!" Gotta learn to trust my instincts better, I guess.

The thing about Greater Metro Orlando is that it's a convention/tourist-trap/vacation town. Used to just be orange groves, before the Big Rat built his nest here. But as the economy's changed, prostitution has become a bit of an epidemic. You can drive up and down Orange Blossom Trail and see this play out in real-time. A couple months ago I nearly had a wreck with a guy who was scoping the women- a Rich White Guy in a Big Fancy Car. Couldn't get more typical. I rolled my window down and yelled at him "Go home to your wife you stupid fucker, what would your mother think!!!!" and he turned down a side street. Presumibly to pick up and exploit the woman he'd nearly caused a wreck over.

Anyways. Craigslist.

I'm sure it's probably similar in metro areas all across the country, but I was disturbed by the ads in the erotic services section, to say the least. All kinds of fucked-up questions generated; the ads are in a sort of menu-format of white-male-supremacism.

I mean, why the hell would men even bother to try and respect women, why when there's just apparently a gaggle of them out there, an "endless supply," in the words of Andrea Dworkin, presumably ready for them to rape at will, who look like "perfect" women according to the Gringo Macho cultural hegemony? Why?

And then there's the self-hate that comes from seeing all this, the immediate drop in self-worth and self esteem, to know that I've been frightfully close to this, to know that there have been times when I damn near did what the women you see in the ads are doing; the inner struggle to not strive to BE LIKE them to gain men's approval. There are more contradictions than we know that comes from this side of white male supremacist culture- the side where we are literally ONLY MEAT. Where we're bought and we're sold and we're brainwashed to think it's perfectly acceptable, that it's all a matter of choice and free will, where we try and try to get the men in our lives to see where they're a part of all this and they just shut us out.

So after my craigslist trauma I took a shower, sat down to look at my emails, and found this, and it helped me remember that I'm part of a movement to rebuild perception and notions of power, and it made me feel a little better, a little bit less wacko.

Pat Head Summit Talks Re: Fuckin' Patriarchal White Supremacist Dipshit Imus

So I keep checking the Knox News Sentinel and generally digging around just to see what the Lady Vols have to say about what Imus said. On the Lady Vols blog I found a wrap-up of Pat Head Summit's statement on the matter.

This made me a little bit proud to say I'm from TN.

I think I listened to Don Imus's show one time, or part of one time, years ago; mainly 'cause someone had mentioned it to me and told me it was funny. I thought it was puerile macho bullshit then and I still do. Every time I've caught a snippet of it those times I was fortunate enough to have cable I've thought the same thing.

OK. So why the fuck do people want to call what I write "vitriol," then grace the blather that this dipshit puts out there with a nomenclature as fancy as "commentary?" Oh yeah, I forgot. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy, and all that shit. Hmph.

My thoughts: yeah, of course the fucker should be fired. He shouldn't even have had the chance to make this mistake. His gig has always been white-male supremacist, imperialist horseshit. ALWAYS. And I ain't no hipster, never have been, so this kinda shit doesn't really have laugh value for me in any sort of abstract, "absurdist" sense (and many thanks to Subject and Object for that handy definition.)

Sorry for putting up my little two cents so late; y'all know I have an allergy to blogging at all.

Fuck the patriarchy. Here's some bell hooks.

Could We Start Again, Please???

To Stan Goff (and please disregard the christy-imagery, the dedication is more about the lyrics):




I must now, sadly, remove Stan from my short list of manly allies.

The person who inspired me to carve my own, albeit unkempt, niche here in blogolandia seems to have gone all bonkers. Or something. He's not been forthcoming for the reasons for his bonkerness. But many of us thought of him as a good leader and a strong ally in a fight that never ends. And I'm sure just as many are sad to see him slip away.

I imagine that if I did write as I damn well should it would be easy for me, a white person who's bloggage totally misses the mark so often, to slip into self-isolation.
My hotel campaign has been my island lately.

No hotel campaign, no family, no one woman or man is an island. Guess we forget that sometimes.

Can we start again, Stan? Please come back to reality.

Pretty Nifty.

Spreading the meme, y'all.

Excuses. Yeah, I Know.

Sixteen hour days and little sleep and no money are making me grumpy and giving me writer's cramp from HELL. So I'm reposting a rant here that I put on myspace, targeting an asshole from my past. Mua haa. Just reread it today and though it's a bit "specific" I still really liked the general ring of it. Enjoy.

Denial is a defense mechanism in which a person is faced with a fact that is too painful to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence. The subject may deny the reality of the unpleasant fact altogether (simple denial), admit the fact but deny its seriousness (minimisation) or admit both the fact and seriousness but deny responsibility (transference). The concept of denial is particularly important to the study of addiction. -From the Wiki



Ah, the fingerpointings and accusations and fucked-up behaviors of the past. These seem to be the things that trudge across my grave lately.

Three years ago I faced a new year as a woman at a crossroads- still stuck in the mud of living my life for a man, with just enough of me heaving through the muck of the surface to want to scratch my way out, for good.

It took me a while to change and to move ahead. It took some time and some hard, mind-warping experience for me to admit that maybe the things I did were more than a little bit fucked-up. It took me being a traitor and a liar. I had to remake the wound, one I already suffered from, myself in a new form in order to start healing and curing it myself. I guess I'm stubborn in that way.

I'm not sure exactly when I had that "ah-ha!" moment, when it really, really hit me, that what I do and what I say and how I live really has an impact on other people. The whole self-indulgent, individualistic, Dionysian meme of hedonistic experience really doesn't fly; it's actually quite contrary to self-preservation.

Why's that?

Well, people are people. We are not Orangutans, we are not Bonobo Chimpanzees. We live in a condition that is far from physical isolation, and our primary adaptive traits are those that allow us to interact with one another- our hands, our complex vocal structures, our big brains, and our bipedal bodies produce an exaptation- culture- which is the physical manifestation of our thoughts. Our cultural and phyisiological evolution is tied together in a spiderweb so intricate that the things we think about and the things we say have physical consequences- no matter what the Smart Dead White Men say about it.

We can imagine and wish all we want that our individual choices only effect us as individuals. To actualy believe that is perhaps the slowest and most painful genocide that we could *choose* to inflict on ourselves.

Perhaps the turning point for me came when I realized that the fact that I had made a conscious *choice* to do something harmful, that the harmful thing was the thing I wanted more than anything to *choose* to do, didn't mean dick to the person that I hurt. It didn't validate me one bit, because the framework from which I'd learned to make my choices was all fucked up in the first place.

I realized that I indeed had become a charicature- of a woman who thought she was doing what she wanted to do, while she was really only playing to the more extreme and prurient wants of the men who were running her life. My actions made me a sort of "gatekeeper"- that's to say that in the bigger scheme of things, I actively chose to reinforce a cycle that oppresses women. I was letting men fuck me over and saying out loud that I loved it- and that more or less gave the men involved a pass to try and do the same with other women. I had abused what privilege I had.

It's odd, isn't it, how a person who wallows in self-pity, in their fucked-up childhood, in all their bad breaks and other such manifestations of their own "individual situations" in order to justify apathy and lack of action- isn't it just a bit odd that such a person can be so very, very proactive when it comes to their own, personal, individual desires?

Then when someone points out the pattern as it repeats, fractalesque, damaging the already damaged- the person who finally gets his turn under the microscope attempts to second-guess the perception of the person peering through the lens; he needs to jar the focus, change the range of magnification.

Thing is, I too had a fucked-up childhood and poverty and abuse and mental assault on my plate from as far back as I can remember. I think the operative difference is in the fact that I came to a point where I realized that hey-wait a minute- I'm still around after all that. That means I must be strong. I've been a strong person all these years, I've just been pushing in the wrong direction- I've been pushing against people who suffer the same shit that I suffer. I made a *choice* to push against the people and the Powers who have made me suffer.

I also figured out that men who abuse and manipulate and hurt and take and take and take are not monsters. They are regular men. That is manliness. Manliness is a bit monstruous, but it's also not abnormal, by any stretch of the imagination. Such is the nature of privilege; something for nothing; entitlement. Every man who wishes to support us has to examine and deconstruct that side of himself and be open to the examination and deconstruction of his masculinity and male privilege, as well as accountability in areas of abuse of said privilege. They close themselves to this, and they are, effectively, against our freedom.

It does not surprise me that a man for whom I used to dance reacted strongly when he realized that I no longer will dance for him, and instead I will merely shove him in the direction that he needs to go. I could give a shit about his navel-gazing and self-reflection. I don't need to know every minute detail of his personal experience to know that his actions hamper and hinder the personal lives of people that I love dearly. His supposed former "respect" for me is a drop of water on a hot stove eye, because he doesn't know shit about respect- except as an abstract and intellectualized concept. And he doesn't seem to have changed a bit from when I last saw him, last knew him.

Words don't mean shit without actions to back them up. Our lives are where we act. If our lives are empty, all our mumblings and rantings and intellectual fiddle-faddle are so much dust in the wind. Stepping away from this man and other men and what they have stood for in my life, that has been a way that I have *chosen* to take action for my own good and the good of others.

Men will always call us bitter and poisonous and any number of names when we make this choice. They'll always attempt to deflect accountability for their own actions back onto us. And they have and always will attempt to threaten the removal of their physical/emotional proximity and whatever validation they percieve it brings in an attempt to castigate us when we don't want to do their fucking dance.

My plan of action is not only not to dance, but to push and to shove and to never, ever let another man step on me again.

BOO!

That's the sound a ghost makes, right?

Just another one of my, "Hey, I ain't dead I'm just busy with life" blogposts.
Since last I posted I have moved into my own apartment in sunny Kissimmee, FL and procured a used loveseat as well as a bed and some other sparse stuff for the place. Which doesn't sound like too much but I've been pulling rather over-the-top workweeks as the campaign I'm on rolls towards closure.

Other shit, like one of my biggest heroes (whether or not he shoulda been) leaving the organized left ('cause the unorganized are already organized, dontcha know- if that happy horseshit ain't blogfodder I don't know WHAT is)and ceasing to answer my emails or phone calls; the dissappearance of the Biting Beaver (though she has since popped up to say SHE'S been having fucked-upedness in her life); the lack of a social network of any kind other than people who are organizing me or people whom I am organizing; the fact that I have to register my car in TWO DAYS in FL in the midst of house visiting with committee people and... and... I mean, I'm kinda glad I can't stop because that means that I can't lose momentum. Right???

And I have grown rather detached from intelligentsi-left, as I've been slogging through the trenches in the right-to-work south, at the mouth of the lair of one of the biggest monster mice the world has ever seen.





Yolanda. I'm totally feelin' it.

Today Yola posted a rather succinct analysis of a frequent malaise of young, oppressed radicals- the one that makes us isolate from one another.

Too much stuff to do. Too little time. Overwhelming.

When I get home from work all I usually want to do is bathe, eat chocolate, and then listen to salsa or go right to sleep. I can't even make myself read nowadays. All of my creative juice is sucked away by my job. ALL of it. I eat and sleep and breath this work; I dream that I'm in the hotel cafeteria, that whether or not someone carries through with some key, crucial task is all up to ME.

I need a kick in the ass from my friends at this point; thing is all my friends are faaaar away.

That's all I can muster tonight. I have stomach cramps to attend to. And I really do have to go on house visits with a committee person tomorrow. (Just one of those little things that makes it all worth it, while swimming and milling around with all these "already-organized" people.)

Just a Reminder...

That this is my piece of the blogosphere and that comments are added or rejected solely at my whim.

Martha. Look at this post before you decide to comment again, if you do.

This blog acts as a platform for 1. my thoughts and 2. well thought-out commentary from others that sticks to the topic at hand, when there does happen to be a topic. It is NOT a platform for puerile libertarianism. Thanks.